Oh c'mon. Verizon et al. paid good money for those lobbyists. It'd be cruel not to give them carte blanche to set their own rules and basically print money. The customers win, if by customers we mean CEOs and stockholders.

Bottom line: all internet users lost, all companies hoping to build new markets or evolve existing ones lost, humanity's pursuit of knowledge lost. All in the name of some fat checks being cashed in by the big telcos.

"Today’s decision will not change consumers’ ability to access and use the Internet as they do now. The court’s decision will allow more room for innovation, and consumers will have more choices to determine for themselves how they access and experience the Internet."

Come on guys, they're just trying to give us more choices!

I know plenty of people who have been saying "I'd love to pay marginally less money to downgrade to a more restricted and limited internet plan".

"The D.C. Circuit's decision is alarming for all Internet users," Harvey Anderson, senior vice president of business and legal affairs for Mozilla, said in a statement. "Thanks to a legal technicality, essential protections for user choice and online innovation are gone. Giving Internet service providers the legal ability to block any service they choose from reaching end users will undermine a once free and unbiased Internet. In order to promote openness, innovation, and opportunity on the Internet, Mozilla strongly encourages the FCC and Congress to act in all haste to correct this error."

Harold Feld, senior vice president for the advocacy group Public Knowledge agreed..."We're disappointed in today's decision," he said in a statement. "The court has taken away important FCC flexibility, and its opinion could complicate FCC efforts to transition the phone network to IP technology, promote broadband build-out, and other matters.

The job of the FCC is not to promote virtue. The confusion of the author of this article about the role of virtue in our society is common to those obsessed with some semi religious ideological vision. The success of our economy has largely been achieved by the choice of effectiveness as the primary criteria for economic behavior. The great step forward for human civilization has largely been marginalizing all of the varied obsessions with virtue to the practice of private religious beliefs. The idea that the internet is some kind of religious happening is delusional at best.

Wonderful. So what happens to the rest of the world if the telcos' plan to charge companies like Netflix -or Ars - which are based in the United States comes to pass? Will telcos like ATT charge for access to not only American subscribers but passage through their networks to the next peer outside of the US? Will companies need to establish datacenters (not just content distribution nodes) outside of the US to provide unrestricted access to other countries? Seems like there could potentially be more fallout from this than just slower speeds for US users.

"I am a firm believer in the market," Wheeler said, as we noted in coverage last month. “I think we’re also going to see a two-sided market where Netflix might say, ‘well, I’ll pay in order to make sure that you might receive, my subscriber receives, the best possible transmission of this movie.’ I think we want to let those kinds of things evolve. We want to observe what happens from that, and we want to make decisions accordingly, but I go back to the fact that the marketplace is where these decisions ought to be made, and the functionality of a competitive marketplace dictates the degree of regulation."

Regulation does not end competition, it molds what the focus of that competition is about. In the current marketplace the competition is about who can charge the most hidden fees to its users. With common carrier law the competition would be about who can provide the best service per dollar. In a marketplace where the service is simple (providing fast internet), allowing "creativity" can only disadvantage the consumer.

Given the current state of the law, and the FCC's decision to not classify broadband ISPs as common carriers, the court made the right decision.

Downvote me if you don't like the decision, but I think it was the right one. But the Court left the door open for the FCC to reclassify broadband Internet access as a Title II common carrier service, and to re-regulate it.

Today, Verizon hailed the court's decision, saying it "found that the FCC could not impose last century’s common carriage requirements on the Internet, and struck down rules that limited the ability of broadband providers to offer new and innovative ways to charge their customers."

"Today’s decision will not change consumers’ ability to access and use the Internet as they do now. The court’s decision will allow more room for innovation, and consumers will have more choices to determine for themselves how they access and experience the Internet."

Come on guys, they're just trying to give us more choices!

I know plenty of people who have been saying "I'd love to pay marginally less money to downgrade to a more restricted and limited internet plan".

Why pay less when you can pay more? Verizon has been itching to double dip on delivered content for years now, and this looks like the Supreme Court saying "go ahead, knock yourself out".

"Today’s decision will not change consumers’ ability to access and use the Internet as they do now. The court’s decision will allow more room for innovation, and consumers will have more choices to determine for themselves how they access and experience the Internet."

Come on guys, they're just trying to give us more choices!

I know plenty of people who have been saying "I'd love to pay marginally less money to downgrade to a more restricted and limited internet plan".

That's really the central issue. There's nothing they can do by violating the Open Internet Order that is good for consumers. If they restrict access to content providers like Netflix, we end up with worse Internet access. If they charge Netflix for access and it has to pay, our Netflix subscription costs go up to fund Verizon a second time for the same access we've already paid for. If they start tiering off parts of the internet like cable services do with channels, we lose access to the open Internet.

There is no conceivable benefit that can occur for customers. It's either a reduction in service from what you have now, or a price increase, or both. None of those situations are good for us.

I think(though I am no lawyer) that it should be possible for the FCC to request a re-hearing of the case from the Appellate Court sitting en banc, with all its members together on the bench. With the 3 recent confirmations, 7 of the appointments to the court were made by Democratic presidents and only 4 by Republican presidents. I should hope taht this would be the first course of action.

"I am a firm believer in the market," Wheeler said, as we noted in coverage last month. “I think we’re also going to see a two-sided market where Netflix might say, ‘well, I’ll pay in order to make sure that you might receive, my subscriber receives, the best possible transmission of this movie.’ I think we want to let those kinds of things evolve. We want to observe what happens from that, and we want to make decisions accordingly, but I go back to the fact that the marketplace is where these decisions ought to be made, and the functionality of a competitive marketplace dictates the degree of regulation."

Unless ISPs collude to have the same fee setup (like cellphone plans), it wouldn't be much of a choice. We're all screwed.

Regulation does not end competition, it molds what the focus of that competition is about. In the current marketplace the competition is about who can charge the most hidden fees to its users. With common carrier law the competition would be about who can provide the best service per dollar. In a marketplace where the service is simple (providing fast internet), allowing "creativity" can only disadvantage the consumer.

Actually, in this case, with the local monopoly rules in place, it has nothing to do with who provides the best service per dollar, but who can get the best deal from the other companies...

Because when your only choices are between Cable and maybe DSL or some form of wireless provider, there's no way to switch to a "better" service...because there isn't one available.

Until cable companies lose their local monopolies, the term "broadband marketplace" in the US is a joke....

So is there a reason why the federal government don't just establish a nation-wide public fiber network and let the ISP compete on service instead of being pipes?

If the federal government has enumerated power "to establish Post Offices and post Roads", then why isn't the ability to establish a internet network just a natural extension of that?

Because the companies that currently own the existing network drive dump trucks full of money to legislators to not do that? What do ya want? They're not made of stone. They GOTTA take that money. You know...for the good of their constituent (notice the conspicuous lack of plural).

It's surprising that Verizon, Comcast and the National Cable Organization are all so committed to keeping everything exactly how it is under this regulation while also needing to get rid of this regulation so that they can innovate and provide new services.

"Today’s decision will not change consumers’ ability to access and use the Internet as they do now. The court’s decision will allow more room for innovation, and consumers will have more choices to determine for themselves how they access and experience the Internet."

Come on guys, they're just trying to give us more choices!

I know plenty of people who have been saying "I'd love to pay marginally less money to downgrade to a more restricted and limited internet plan".

That's really the central issue. There's nothing they can do by violating the Open Internet Order that is good for consumers. If they restrict access to content providers like Netflix, we end up with worse Internet access. If they charge Netflix for access and it has to pay, our Netflix subscription costs go up to fund Verizon a second time for the same access we've already paid for. If they start tiering off parts of the internet like cable services do with channels, we lose access to the open Internet.

There is no conceivable benefit that can occur for customers. It's either a reduction in service from what you have now, or a price increase, or both. None of those situations are good for us.

I fail to see how charging Netflix for a superior connection is any different then what Netflix has been trying to do already by asking ISP's to install caching servers directly to their networks.

In terms of no benefits to consumers. There are genuine QoS techniques that rely on discriminating traffic.

Real time traffic being more important than email for example.

Lastly, if all it takes is the FCC to reclassify them to bring on more regulatory scrutiny do you think the ISPs are going to discriminate in a manner to piss anyone off?

I'd bet my left nut that not a damn bit of doom and gloom will come to fruition.

It's surprising that Verizon, Comcast and the National Cable Organization are all so committed to keeping everything exactly how it is under this regulation while also needing to get rid of this regulation so that they can innovate and provide new services.

Verizon Wireless used to say the same thing about unlimited data. Now they have data caps. Hell, everybody has data caps! Technically speaking, data caps doesn't serve any purpose other than being able to charge more money from their customers. Bandwidth cap, I understand, but data? Come on..

I think(though I am no lawyer) that it should be possible for the FCC to request a re-hearing of the case from the Appellate Court sitting en banc, with all its members together on the bench. With the 3 recent confirmations, 7 of the appointments to the court were made by Democratic presidents and only 4 by Republican presidents. I should hope taht this would be the first course of action.

I think that is correct.

OTOH, the Court ruled that a regulatory agency could not make rules in violation of the authorizing statute. We should all be praising that decision.

Instead, everyone is wringing their hands. Why?

Just because people happened to LIKE the illegal rules is no reason to support an agency making a rule where it had no legal authority to do so. That is the very definition of an out of control regulatory agency. Next time, the agency might create an illegal rule that you DON'T like.

Had the FCC ruled ISPs to be common carriers, THEN it could have legally created and applied common carrier rules to those ISPs. But the FCC ruled ISPs were not common carriers. Having done so, the FCC couldn't then apply common carrier rules to them, when the law clearly prohibits that.

So basically, the FCC did something illegal, and we're all sad that the court told them they couldn't do that.

The job of the FCC is not to promote virtue. The confusion of the author of this article about the role of virtue in our society is common to those obsessed with some semi religious ideological vision. The success of our economy has largely been achieved by the choice of effectiveness as the primary criteria for economic behavior. The great step forward for human civilization has largely been marginalizing all of the varied obsessions with virtue to the practice of private religious beliefs. The idea that the internet is some kind of religious happening is delusional at best.

You are correct that the job of the government is not to promote virtue. However, the job of the government is to protect the greater good of its citizens.

This ruling could allow for exclusive deals with content providers. For example, to get Netflix you have to subscribe to Verizon, to get Amazon Prime you need Comcast etc.

Allowing for a fragmented internet does not benefit the general population.

new fees for content providers in the wireless market, which wasn't subject to all the provisions of the Open Internet Order. We can expect such arrangements to happen in the wired broadband market unless something changes.

"I'm not a content provider when I'm communicating" . That is the problem .

I fail to see how charging Netflix for a superior connection is any different then what Netflix has been trying to do already by asking ISP's to install caching servers directly to their networks.

Here's the difference:

Scenario 1 (today's scenario): Netflix spends $10k on the box, gives it to the ISP. Scenario 2 (Verizon's solution): Netflix (and every other major service provider) pays Verizon $1M per month to not have their content throttled down to 50kbps shared among all of their customers.

I fail to see how charging Netflix for a superior connection is any different then what Netflix has been trying to do already by asking ISP's to install caching servers directly to their networks.

Here's the difference:

Scenario 1 (today's scenario): Netflix spends $10k on the box, gives it to the ISP. Scenario 2 (Verizon's solution): Netflix (and every other major service provider) pays Verizon $1M per month to not have their content throttled down to 50kbps shared among all of their customers.

Scenario 3 Netflix pays to have access faster than the customers current speed tier.

Verizon is not going to do anything to risk putting them under stricter regulation. I would bet 10 grand on that.

Regulation does not end competition, it molds what the focus of that competition is about. In the current marketplace the competition is about who can charge the most hidden fees to its users. With common carrier law the competition would be about who can provide the best service per dollar. In a marketplace where the service is simple (providing fast internet), allowing "creativity" can only disadvantage the consumer.

Actually, in this case, with the local monopoly rules in place, it has nothing to do with who provides the best service per dollar, but who can get the best deal from the other companies...

Because when your only choices are between Cable and maybe DSL or some form of wireless provider, there's no way to switch to a "better" service...because there isn't one available.

Until cable companies lose their local monopolies, the term "broadband marketplace" in the US is a joke....

Exclusive franchise agreements are not even the biggest part of the problem. Even in places where there aren't any, the cost of laying an entirely new network is a massive barrier to entry and the maximum number of competitors is still capped because no municipality is going to allow running multiple lines to houses for the same purpose past a certain point.

Infrastructure is a natural monopoly, so it is almost impossible for there be free market competition involving it. The physical lines have to be taken out of the equation if there is ever going to be competition in service.

ISP's are common carriers. End of story. Trying to write rules to make them de facto common carriers obviously didn't work. So now it's time to be explicit about it. It's the modern iteration of the traditional POTS phone network. It should be regulated as such.